Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Tevis accidentally made a buy off the DJ,” she told Fiorella.

  “No shit?”

  “You want it?” he asked her.

  “Nah, I copped molly off the bartender like twenty minutes ago. Where you guys been? I’ve already taken three tequila shots on Gonz’s bar tab.”

  “He’s buying?” Tevis said.

  “Yeah right. He left it open and then got distracted talking to this chick, some poor chubby white girl who wandered into his talons.”

  “Redhead?” Janice asked. “Eyes super wide apart on her face?”

  “You know her?”

  “I saw her.”

  “So we’re done, then?” Tevis said. “Back to the rumpus?”

  “What’s wrong with your face?” Fiorella asked him.

  “What’s wrong with my face?”

  Fiorella looked around at all the dudes, nine deep now, outside the bathroom. “Why’s there such a long-ass line for the men’s?”

  “I think someone’s getting a blowjob,” Janice told her.

  “What’s wrong with my face?” Tevis said again.

  “Your lotion,” Fiorella said as she pulled Janice away by her elbow. “Go wash up, then meet us at the bar. I’m thinking Gonz is gonna be buying rounds all night.”

  “My lotion?” he said, confused, touching his cheeks, the manila envelope still in his hand. “What’s the matter with my lotion?”

  “You’re glowing,” Janice said.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re glowing!” she shouted into the music, but Fiorella had already dragged her too far away.

  Hours later the uncles staggered out of the club. The bouncers told them to take it easy. The sidewalks, wet with rain, reflected light from brontosaural streetlamps. Gonz insisted on driving back to the rumpus, and because he’d paid his tab without bitching—or more likely without looking at it—they indulged him. He got as far as the first traffic light before a tall and beautiful Latina transvestite lay down on the hood of their car. Five months late, or seven months early, she wore a slutty Halloween costume: a police-girl uniform with blue short-shorts, a plastic billy club, reflective sunglasses, and a neon squirt gun holstered to her hip, everything but the detective badge from the Rite Aid toy aisle. Her dark curly hair spread like algae across the windshield. Gonz honked and cursed, but she just laughed, sprawled out on the hood through an entire traffic-light cycle, from red to green and back to red. Then, as delicately as she’d hopped on, she hopped off and strutted away toward a parked van on the opposite side of the street. QUEENS #1 CARPET CLEANERS said the side paneling. Its back doors swung silently open for her.

  “What just happened?” Fiorella said.

  “I’m gonna tell you something,” Gonz said. “If patrols actually looked like that, I’d volunteer to get demoted.”

  Janice said, “You know that was a tranny hooker, right?”

  “Amazing observation,” he deadpanned. “You know, it’s a shame you won’t last the full eighteen and get to put those incredible detective skills of yours to use.”

  If Puffy were there, he would’ve thanked Gonz for the pep talk, but instead Tevis asked him, “No, but seriously, you do know that was a tranny hooker, right?”

  When another beautiful transvestite hooker, this one dressed as a slutty nurse, climbed up into the same van, Fiorella said, “What is going on?”

  Janice thought it might have had a bizarro connection to the big news of the day, that a federal wiretap had caught the New York governor paying for sex. “Ho No!” said the Post. “Gov in Romp with Hooker ‘Kristen.’ ” But that didn’t really explain these particular streetwalkers or their getups, not that Janice even wanted them explained. She felt happier not knowing. She wouldn’t have changed any of this. While Vita and Judith and Barbara and Brother and all the high school friends she didn’t have time for, while all those people were at home, in bed, asleep, Janice was getting paid to be here, in the backseat of an unmarked car, drunk on free booze, awake and somehow simultaneously inside the rubric of dreams. Before another ass could plop itself onto the hood, Gonz sped through the intersection without waiting for the light to turn green. Nobody honked. Except for the party in that carpet-cleaning van, they had the entire road to themselves.

  The Post’s headline the next day, day two of the Spitzer scandal, read: “Hooked: Sex Addict Gov Spent $80,000 on Call Girls.” The uncles were inspired. Stuck in the rumpus all afternoon without any buys to look forward to, they whittled away their shifts trading stories about the worst things they’d ever done. Fiorella confessed to stealing twenty dollars out of her son’s sock drawer. Tevis said he probably didn’t remember the worst thing he’d ever done, but the last bad thing happened just this weekend when he went to drop off his daughters at the ex-wife’s house. Because he seemed ready to slip into his epic mode, the uncles told him it sounded like a very interesting story but could he please maybe table it for another time. As if troubled by the overly serious tone of the conversation, Puffy said the worst thing he’d ever done was spill wee-wee on Janice’s lap. Gonz refused to play along, so they answered for him: being born. Pablo Rivera, paranoid as always, citing the wolflike ears of Internal Affairs, also refused to participate, but Grimes admitted to burning down his own house. On purpose? On purpose. The uncles didn’t seem to know what to do with that. They turned to Eddie Murphy, who said he had two worst things: wearing a leather beanie in The Golden Child and that long wig in Vampire in Brooklyn. A total lame-azoid, Janice told them that her sister had once dared her to steal something from a gas station and so she snuck out a can of Sunkist under her sweatshirt, but afterward she felt so guilty and so eager to get rid of the evidence that she puked halfway through guzzling it, and to this day couldn’t drink orange soda without throwing up.

  “Are you serious?” Klondike said.

  “I know, it’s pathetic, but I can’t really think of—”

  “No, no, no,” Morris said. “It’s amazing.”

  They sent James Chan to go buy a Sunkist from the reception area’s vending machine. Well, not exactly to buy a Sunkist, but to use his weird button-mashing trick to get one for free. Because the uncles had nothing better to do, and because Rubí had gone off the air and its replacement—the Mexican telenovela Amigas y Rivales—had yet to gain traction for them, they gathered in the lounge to circle around Janice and watch her drink orange soda over a garbage can. She slipped the rubber band off her wrist to tie back her hair. She didn’t want to do this.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she told them.

  “We appreciate that,” Fiorella said, “but this is really about the greater needs of the group as a whole.”

  To encourage her, the uncles got a chug-a-lug chant going. Their fists bobbed in unison. The soda can’s metal tab, after Janice had bent it back and forth a few times, broke off on D, the first and/or last initial of her future husband. Matt Damon? Danny DeVito? She started chugging. She knew if she didn’t puke, she’d disappoint everyone, so she bolted the soda in painful gulps until its orange fizz sprang tears into her eyes. Without her quite noticing, the chanting had stopped. When she paused to take a breath, she saw Sergeant Hart looming over her.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but you do realize I got a deck to get fixed, right?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not yet understanding.

  “Don’t be sorry. You didn’t build it. McCarthy and Duckenfield, they built it, that’s the problem. Irene’s worried it slopes too much, it’s slipping into the foundation there, and the grandkids are gonna hurt themselves. Okay? Now I gotta get a contractor to level it all out. That’s parts, labor, work permits, the whole thing. Hold on. Then I got Thomasina starting Haverford next fall. Can’t go to SUNY like a normal human being—she needs a liberal-arts education. If I told you what that costs, Itwaru, you’d call me a liar straight to my face. But what about Irene? Can’t forget about her. What do you think? You think she doesn’t need money? She says she’s
worried about empty-nest syndrome. She says she’s gotta get certified for a yoga instructor license. What that costs, you don’t want to know. It’s an investment for our future, she tells me. That’s fine, Irene, that’s great, but you gotta have money before you can invest, am I right? You gotta have money to send Thomasina to Haverford. You gotta have money to fix the deck so the grandkids don’t fall off and crack their heads open. Meanwhile, Itwaru, we don’t even have any grandkids yet. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Not really, sir, no.”

  “Oh wow,” said Puffy, God bless him. “I thought it was just me.”

  “Oh wow, where’s my fucking overtime?” Hart asked. He booted the garbage can across the lounge, the circled-up uncles finally scrambling out of the way. Shredded papers spilled across the carpet for someone else to clean up. “You ain’t making buys, Itwaru, we ain’t making overtime. What does that mean? That means I’m home an extra ten hours a week. No one wants that. You think Irene wants that? Irene doesn’t want that. Where I’m sitting out in the backyard staring at a sloping deck? Fantasizing about the fancy juicer I can’t afford, three hundred bucks, practically cleans itself, not that anybody cares what I want, right? Right?”

  “I’m trying to make buys,” she said.

  “Oh, obviously!” he said, looking around the room. “Obviously you are working very, very hard here.” He took the Sunkist from her and smelled it before handing it back. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked. “Stop trying and start doing your job, yeah? I don’t care if you’ve suddenly gone incompetent, if you can’t remember how to make buys anymore. I do not care. Figure it out. Because right now? Right now you are fucking with my money and my money is not to be fucked with.”

  To be fair, she’d made three buys in the last week, two of which went up on the board next to her name, but none of them had led to an arrest for the 115 investigators. As far as Sergeant Hart and his team were concerned, she was the girl who missed Tevis’s positive, left drugs up in the Martys’ apartment, and hadn’t been able to find the Elmhurst Hospital meth clinic. Of course none of the uncles had been able to find the Elmhurst Hospital meth clinic, but why not blame only her? Why not! Hart’s pants swished and his Altoids tin rattled as he strode away from her, past the uncles who’d all hung around to witness her humiliation, past Lieutenant Prondzinski who stood in the lounge’s entryway to stare at her over the top of a mug that said STOP, THINK, GO GREEN. A grainy tadpole of vomit swam up into Janice’s mouth, but she forced it back down.

  Two days later she vomited for real, no Sunkist required, in an apartment building stairwell. This was over in LeFrak City, municipally speaking not an actual city but a twenty-tower cluster of affordable housing at the southern edge of Corona, within the 115’s jurisdiction. The original developer, Monsieur LeFrak—like Janice, prudently superstitious—had designed the buildings without thirteenth floors, and so it was somewhere in that negative zone between twelve and fourteen that she threw up her dinner. But hold on. A little backtracking: the day before, she’d spent her entire shift sort of ghosting Gonz. Unlike Janice and Tevis, who worked almost exclusively with the 115 investigators, Gonz got passed around from team to team, always on temporary assignment, as if he were the gun in Russian roulette. Yesterday it had been Janice’s turn to ghost him, but—without any of the investigators knowing—he’d decided to play hooky with his chubby redhead, the poor Pure Magic girl who apparently lived nearby in a Jackson Heights co-op. Lucky for Gonz, awful for Janice. Awful for the redhead probably, too. To cover for him, Janice had sat in a bar across from the co-op, sipping on Dos Equis and telling stories into the Nextel. Uncle is approaching a homeless black guy. Uncle is approaching an Asian bag lady. When their shift ended without any positive signals, the investigators all blamed her. Reasonably, of course, because what wasn’t her fault? So she couldn’t fuck up two consecutive fishing trips, Sergeant Hart paired her with Narco’s best confidential informant, a guy named Kevin Loquaio, but please call him K-Lo. A civilian snitch in the department’s employ, he stood upwind from Janice in the LeFrak stairwell, two steps above her, his fingers overdramatically pinching his nose. Vomit had splattered her sneakers.

  “Yuck,” he said. With skin the color of whiskey, he was of an indeterminate race, even more so than Janice. He wore glasses covered in scratches. A deep dimple collapsed his chin. Normally he worked cases with Puffy in Astoria, but he’d told the investigators about an apartment in LeFrak that’d sell crack to anybody, no problem, something Hart assured her even she couldn’t botch. “You pregnant?” K-Lo asked her. “Because Mrs. Lo? When she’s carrying, God bless her? She’s liable to get sick all times of day, don’t have to be morning exclusive.”

  “I’m not pregnant, you jackass.”

  He grinned, thrilled to have goaded that out of her. He trafficked in information; spent his nights collecting data, secrets, confessions, and accidental admissions; his days splicing it together until all the angles revealed themselves. “You think it was maybe them carnitas you scarfed?” he asked. “Can I tell you something? Street carts, restaurants, I don’t trust any of them. You hear they gonna start putting sanitation grades in the windows? Now, why they wanna do that unless there be something nasty going on behind doors?”

  “Can you please stop talking?” she said, hunched over, her hands on her knees.

  “What’s the matter? You nervous? Because my tummy, it’ll get upset when I’m nervous. Puffy says it’s okay to be a little nervous. You’d be weird if you weren’t, he says. Hey, how come you all call him Puffy? You ask me, he don’t look like a Puffy.” He touched the skin on his face, as if testing his own puffiness. “Mrs. Lo, she met him. She thinks he’s sort of a handsome devil. I can see that, I guess. How long you known him for? He’s a pretty nice guy, yeah? How come—”

  “I’m not nervous,” she said.

  “You don’t got the flu, do you?” he asked, backing up another two steps.

  Truth be told, she was sort of nervous—she hadn’t stepped inside an apartment to make a buy since the Marty incident—but that had nothing to do with the vomit between her shoes. Blame that on physical exhaustion. She had insisted they skip the coffin-like closeness of the elevator and instead walk up the stairs. Fourteen stories? Shouldn’t have been a problem. On vertical patrols as a Housing cop, she had climbed project stairwells all day every day, but now, seventeen months later, she felt as if she’d swallowed a box of needles. Blame it on all those hours of rumpus inactivity. Blame it on A.R.’s Tavern, their cheap drink specials, the six pounds she’d gained since the holidays, the Planet Fitness membership card that perpetually languished in her wallet, and yeah, sure, blame it on the two carnitas she’d gobbled down and the spicy aji verde sauce that tasted like flames as they came up. She wiped her mouth with the back of her coat sleeve.

  “You know,” K-Lo said, “there’s no shame in taking the elevator the rest of the way.”

  “What’s the matter? You’re tired?”

  Two flights of stairs later, they were walking down a poorly lit hallway toward apartment 16–. Toys covered the floor: Smurf dolls, a wooden elephant, plastic fruits and plastic veggies, a Baby’s First laptop lying open as if some child had been called in to dinner in the middle of data entry. The closer she and K-Lo got to the apartment, the more shit they had to step around. No rush, though: a cock diesel black guy stood in front of 16–’s open door. Another customer, she thought. Ahead of them on line. Just as the stereotypes would have indicated, cocaine seemed to attract a far nattier dresser than the weed- and crack-buyers she was accustomed to seeing. The guy wore a dark suit with black shoes most likely made in a non-Asian country and a bright-red Fruit of Islam bowtie. He spoke to the tired-looking Latina inside the apartment with the aggressive patience—which is to say no patience at all—of a man who, wherever he went, was almost always bigger than everyone else.

  “Yeah, okay, but I’m her father,” he was saying. “I’ve got custody rights.”

/>   “Yes, but your name’s not on the pickup list,” the woman said.

  “You keep telling me about this list. This list? I don’t need to be on your list. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I’m her father. I’m on the legal custody rights list. That’s the list I’m on.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to please keep your voice down out of consideration for my neighbors,” the woman told him, as if it were a well-rehearsed line.

  “Excuuuse us,” K-Lo said and squirted himself through the doorway with weaselly ease.

  On behalf of the New York City Police Department, Sergeant Hart would pay him a flat fee for his CI services, and the faster K-Lo got in, the faster he got out, the faster he got his palm laid with cash, the faster he got to move onto his next up-the-block hustle. Impressed with how easily he’d insinuated himself into the apartment, Janice decided that when they finished here she’d let him take the elevator down without her. But first, apologizing, squeezing past both the black guy and the Latina, she followed him inside, where more toys, hundreds of them, overstuffed the living room. A little black girl sat still and quiet on the carpet with her back to the door. Plastic beads covered the tips of her cornrows. She drew purple weblike lines on her arm with a Magic Marker, presumably nontoxic, for the whole apartment had been marshaled to protect her. Duct tape covered the electrical sockets. A waist-high plastic gate kept her out of the kitchen; another gate prevented her from reaching a glass door that opened onto a balcony. Somehow, even with all these precautions, a flesh-colored patch—flesh-colored for white people—covered one eye.

  “Hiya, sweetie,” Janice said as she crouched down in front of her. The girl didn’t look up, wouldn’t look up, but Janice pressed on: “What happened to your eye?”